Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are used to write to and read from solid state storage, which (in turn) are used in mobile devices. Naturally, since mobile devices operate off of a battery, power consumption is an important issue for all components, including LDPC decoders.
A straightforward way to save power is to reduce the number of bits used to represent the soft information which is input by the LDPC decoder. This translates directly into a reduction in the number of operations which in turn reduces power consumption. Unfortunately, simply reducing the number of bits can cause significant performance degradation (e.g., because of numerical errors, rounding errors, and/or saturation errors). New LDPC decoding techniques which have reduced performance degradation (particularly in systems where the number of bits used to represent soft information is relatively small) would be desirable. This would, for example, enable power to be conserved without sacrificing too much performance.